"Waiting is the perfect subject-matter for such stretched-out forms, and indeed the collection’s most perfect line is about this substance of empty time: ‘in waiting you are the numbers’." Annie McDermott on Jim Goar • Literateur

"At the beginning of language there were two distinct urges: one to register presence, the other to register desire. The first—a cry—became poetry; the second—a question—became the story." George Szirtes • Almost Island

"Commas slow down reading artificially, just like the line break or medial caesura. Poetry in which commas are used as a graphic or visual device slows down language in order to make it appear inexpressible, ineffable—the typical domain of poetry. But this is not really the case; it’s a hallucination that most poetry creates quite deliberately." Tan Lin in conversation with Katherine Elaine Sanders • Bombsite

"In the wake of the various modernist disruptions of poetic decorum, however, stillness and restraint became associated with the kind of poems we call traditional, while energy and excess were claimed by the poems we call experimental. 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' embodied this predicament for us almost a hundred years ago, and it shows few signs of abating." James Longenbach • Poetry Daily

"It was at the crossroads of their two poetic traditions, French and English, that Beach and Monnier undertook one of their most influential joint works, the first French translation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which appeared in Monnier’s Le Navire d’Argent in 1925 [...] Their translation reminds us that “Prufrock” is a poem that is deeply at home in French, inspired by the decaying urban scenes of Baudelaire and the Symbolist verse of Jules Laforgue." Keri Walsh on Shakespeare & Co. • Brick

"In the wake of the various modernist disruptions of poetic decorum, however, stillness and restraint became associated with the kind of poems we call traditional, while energy and excess were claimed by the poems we call experimental. 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' embodied this predicament for us almost a hundred years ago, and it shows few signs of abating." James Longenbach • Poetry Daily

"The discipline of creative writing is believed to be toxic by some, including the new Professor of Poetry at Oxford." Michael Schmidt • PN Review

"The cult of personality surrounding Pessoa is captivating, because he was relatively unknown while alive, and revealed himself as the most multifarious of writers after his sudden death." Syma Tariq • Guardian

"The city, like the country, is to the people whose histories are rooted there
the site of triumph, trauma, variants of nostalgia – the elementary pharmakon, both cure and poison." Karen Solie on Frank O'Hara • Magma

"Reviewing was also a way of exploring Scotland, which sometimes bore very direct fruit, as in the case of Tom Leonard's Places of the Mind (1993), a biography of the alcoholic Scottish poet James Thomson, "B. V.", who became the subject of the second of Imlah's "Afterlives of the Poets."" Alan Hollinghurst on poet-editor Mick Imlah • Guardian

"Maybe it’s the remainder tables that secretly move the culture forward. Up-and-coming writers, strapped for cash and dismissive of the books that are being published and getting noticed, gravitate toward these steam tables of overlooked lit, these shallow arks of the minor." Ed Park • Poetry

"Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler are both fine argument-starters, modernist products of their time. One senses that besides death, these books are combatting another formidable antagonist: the 21st century." Daisy Fried • New York Times

"But what matters more to Stevenson than fame--she advises poets, in 'Making Poetry', to 'evade . . . the siren hiss of publish, success, publish / success, success, success'-–is to 'play' in verse the music that, since going deaf in her thirties, she can no longer hear in reality." Andrew McCulloch on Anne Stevenson • TLS

The Page aims to gather links to some of the Web's most interesting writing.

Reader suggestions for links, and other comments, are always welcome; send them to thepage.name ät hotmail dõt com

The Page is edited by John McAuliffe, Vincenz Serrano and, since September 2013, Evan Jones at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. It was founded in October 2004 by Andrew Johnston, who edited it until October 2009.